Published Briefs
Browse maps that already feel finished.
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Hand-picked by the DeepThought team, a strong place to start.
Shared Layers, Systemic Risk
How concentration in an invisible layer, a shared hiring model, a memory market, a CPU cache, turns local efficiency into systemic fragility.
Platform Rent Under Siege
A structural map of how the app-store 'toll' on developer revenue is being dismantled by litigation and regulation, and whether the savings actually reach developers and consumers.
The Agent Trust Boundary
A map of how MCP-driven AI agents inherit trust from supply chains, protocols, and tools, and what containment primitives actually push the blast radius back.
Inference Economics
The AI competitive axis has shifted from model capability to inference economics. As agentic workflows multiply LLM calls per request, inference cost becomes the gross-margin variable, reshaping SaaS pricing, model architecture, and defense AI deployment all at once.
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36 maps
The terms for using an actor's face and voice
Using an actor's face and voice with AI is a filmmaking choice when there is consent and misappropriation when there is not. This map sets side by side cases of de-aging and misuse, the Tokyo District Court's first ruling that the voice is protected by the right of publicity, guidance from Japan's Ministry of Justice, the voice clause in Korea's Unfair Competition Prevention Act and digital DNA registration, and points to the requirements that remain unsettled.
The fourteen satellites Nuri placed in orbit on its fifth launch
On its fifth launch on October 7, Nuri (KSLV-II) placed five micro-satellites from a constellation and nine cubesats into their target orbit. It was South Korea's first satellite constellation launch, sending five national satellites with the same mission into orbit at once, while nine of the ten accompanying cubesats also reached orbit. Statements from the Korea AeroSpace Administration (KASA), the Korea Aerospace Research Institute (KARI) and KAIST provide the basis for this account of the satellites' missions, separation procedures, contact sequence and the transfer of launch operations to the private sector.
No firing on AI alone: the four lines California drew around workplace AI
On September 30, 2026, California's governor signed a set of bills regulating AI used at work. They ban discipline and firing based solely on AI, surveillance that reads emotions or neural data, and monitoring in restrooms. When AI causes a mass layoff, the notice must say so. Only the government can enforce these laws, and workers cannot sue on their own.
Where short-form drama viewers flocked as their numbers tripled
In August this year, 2.98 million Koreans used short-form drama apps, 3.3 times the number a year earlier, and 8 of the top 10 apps were Chinese-affiliated. Separate branches cover the apps attracting viewers, Korean platforms that expanded overseas first, Korean production companies entering as suppliers, and low production costs. Revenue and revenue sharing that have yet to be disclosed are grouped in another branch.
Conditions, not login rewards: reading the EU KIDS Act's game provisions
The EU KIDS Act, the proposed regulation on protecting minors online released by the European Commission on September 17, brings together the obligations of game providers in Article 15. Separate branches cover the wording of Article 9(2)(b) and (d), which Article 15 applies, and interpretations of login streak rewards and come-back notifications based on those provisions. Matters for which numerical thresholds have yet to be set are grouped in a separate branch.
KTX and SRT: The path to one booking platform
High-speed rail services previously operated separately by Korail and SR were unified this year. Trial runs in February and May were followed by merger approval and the launch of the integrated app Korail+ on August 3, then integrated train services on September 1. From October, tickets will go on sale two months before departure. This briefing traces the changes to fares, seats, membership migration and booking methods through announcements from the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport and Korail.
Before an SMR Reaches the Grid
Kairos Power announced on September 21 that it had signed an investment term sheet with Samsung C&T. The package is up to $100 million across direct investment and in-kind services, and it goes toward completing Hermes 2, a 50 MW demonstration reactor in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. The map lays out the gates a small modular reactor passes before it produces power, from reactor type, construction permit and demonstration plant to power buyers, the split of construction work and financial close, drawing on public material from both companies and from projects in Sweden and Romania.
Korea's AI Music Registration, Reversed in 22 Days
On whether a song made with AI can be registered, the standard at Korea's music copyright society moved from hold to allowed to withdrawn from March 2025 onward. The new rule lasted 22 days, and songs that completed registration inside that window go through cancellation. Follow the dates the decisions travelled and what is still undecided comes into view.
Why Is Nike Being Pushed Out of the S&P 100: Five Years of Direct Sales, Wholesale and Greater China
S&P Dow Jones Indices will remove Nike from the S&P 100 before the open on September 21. Its market value fell from a November 2021 peak of $264 billion to about $57 billion on September 8. In fiscal 2026, direct-to-consumer revenue fell 6% while wholesale rose 6%. The company expects revenue declines to continue through the first half of fiscal 2027.
Where Did an Audio Serial App's Revenue Come From: AI Production, Retention and Paid Episodes
Pocket FM, an audio serial app that started in India, passed a $500 million run rate, and its CEO said AI is used in 93% of its catalog. The map looks at the gap between an article saying revenue doubled in a year and a press release saying 70% year over year, and at revenue split between ads and episode payments, while keeping the company's explanation for retention apart from the confirmed numbers.
What Moves When Seoul Home Prices Rise
When Seoul apartment prices rise, lending rules tighten first and jeonse leases turn into monthly rent. In a market with fewer homes ready to move into, young households take on the burden first. When that burden comes back as approval ratings, the government again reaches for loans, taxes or supply.
Chip Stocks Shaken by Both Oil and Interest Rates
On September 14 the Philadelphia Semiconductor Index fell 5.86% in a single day, Brent crude settled above $105 a barrel, and the US 10-year Treasury yield topped 5% intraday. The map traces five paths by which oil and rates reach chip stocks, through discount rates, inflation and the Fed, factory power, chip demand, and Korea's currency and bonds, and also the days when money flowed into chips instead.
Robotaxis Converging on the Strip
Waymo began carrying public riders in Las Vegas on September 14, 25 days after the Nevada Transportation Authority approved commercial permits on August 20 for up to 5,000 Tesla vehicles and 1,000 each for Waymo and an Uber subsidiary. The map lays out the conditions and fleet caps attached to the permits, Waymo's invite-code launch, Zoox already charging fares, and the taxi industry that opposed the permits.
The Netflix Film That Opens in Theaters First
Possible Love, produced by Netflix, won the Grand Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival on September 12, and it opens in Korean cinemas on September 23 before reaching Netflix on November 6. The map sets out the Silver Lion name shared by two prizes, the entry conditions at Cannes and Venice, and this year's changed Oscar rules for International Feature Film. At Venice, the only prize that can put a film into Oscar consideration without a national submission is the Golden Lion.
Share Count as the Denominator
Adobe's third-quarter net income rose 3.1% from a year earlier, yet its earnings per share rose 10.5%. The reason is that the share count used in the calculation fell from 424 million to 395 million. The map follows the same division through the Miro and Myrealtrip acquisition announcements and the warrants in AMD's quarterly report, each a place where one share's portion changes.
OKR
OKR runs a quarter on one objective line and three or four key results. This map works through why the objective carries no numbers, how output metrics differ from outcome metrics, what has to be true before 0.6 to 0.7 scoring means anything, and what happens when committed and aspirational goals share an unlabeled page. The writing day is not where it gets decided; the three months after are.
Price or Volume
In a month when Korea's export total rose 68.7%, refined petroleum products gained 65% in value while the volume actually shipped fell 2%. The first reason given for the fall in cars is not sales but where last year's factory holiday landed on the calendar. One line reading $98.25 billion holds items that moved in opposite directions.
How Korea Splits a Music Stream
The money behind one play does not land on one person. Rights fork into songwriting, performance and the recording itself, with collecting societies and a government approved tariff sitting in between. The 65 to 35 streaming split was fixed in 2018, and a chart position comes out of an entirely different ledger.
How Korea Knows It's You
In Korea almost every sign-up screen asks for a mobile number before it lets you through. This map unfolds the layers stacked on top of the 2012 ban on collecting resident registration numbers online: designated verification bodies, certificates, financial identity rules, and mobile ID. It ends where foreign residents meet a different outcome on the same screen.
Who Gets the Bill
Money spent on the AI buildout does not settle inside the data center. This map lays out the three places the cost actually lands: the power contract that recovers what someone paid to secure electricity, the memory that reached the data center first, and the single word written into a layoff announcement.
The System Behind the Channel
Korean broadcasting read not by channel number but by license and funding: terrestrial networks, general programming channels, cable PPs, radio, and OTT. One canvas on how the money paths of license fees, ads, carriage fees, and subscriptions shape what airs.
Transfer by Design
Why Seoul transit, run by dozens of operators, bills like one system on one card. From the integrated transfer discount and the color-coded route hierarchy to the 15-minute re-entry waiver, a systems-design reading of urban transit.
Eisenhower Matrix
An operating map for the Eisenhower Matrix, separating urgent from important: action principles for the four quadrants, the distortions where urgency impersonates importance, and the weekly review ritual that protects Q2.
First Principles Thinking
A working procedure for first principles thinking: expose the inertial assumptions, break the problem down to facts, and rebuild from a blank page. Two applied examples in cost structure and technology choice, the division of labor with reasoning by analogy, and the boundary that prevents overuse.
Five Whys
An operating map for Five Whys, from symptom down to process defect: defining the problem, what happens at each layer of the five whys, the three traps of blaming people, settling for the first answer, and chaining guesses, plus verifying that the fix actually prevents recurrence.
SWOT Analysis
How to use SWOT without stopping at four filled boxes: the qualifying questions and common misreads for each quadrant, SO and WT crossover strategies, and the operating rules that keep the page alive.
The Cost of One Token
What it costs an LLM to produce one token depends more on serving design than on the GPU price tag. Starting from why decode is bound by memory bandwidth, the map follows how serving techniques such as batching, quantization and speculative decoding, and model designs such as MoE and MLA, change how many tokens the same GPU can produce. It traces that difference all the way to API price lists, product margins and the job that handles this work.
OCR Is Research Again
Why document OCR stopped being a solved commodity in 2026, small specialized models, page-uncut long-horizon parsing, and a benchmark ceiling that no longer separates the leaders.
Beyond LoRA
A map of parameter-efficient fine-tuning after LoRA, how DoRA, PiSSA, VeRA and friends trade accuracy against memory on a single Pareto frontier.
The License You Already Bought
How Broadcom's conversion of perpetual VMware licenses into subscriptions broke a contract, opened a migration market, and pushed enterprises toward Proxmox, Nutanix, and OpenStack.
The Story Economy
A map exploring how generative AI reshapes the content economy, automating production while pushing value toward trust, tooling, and physical authenticity.
AI Output, Verified
How arXiv's ban on hallucinated citations turned AI-output verification into a priced market, an engineering discipline, and a founder's opening.
Korea Tourism Surplus: Inbound Tech Opportunity
Korea's first tourism trade surplus in 11 years, ₩387.5B in March 2026, 4.74M monthly visitors, 2M annual medical tourists, signals a structural shift that opens product gaps in OTA, medical-tourism SaaS, and K-content travel platforms.
LLM Agent Design Patterns
arXiv:2605.13850 systematizes 27 agent design patterns from 7 cognitive axes × 6 execution topologies, with 5 empirical laws for selection. GraphBit (arXiv:2605.13848) takes the DAG + Rust-engine approach to 67.6% on GAIA, a 14.7pp gain with 0% hallucination.
AAA Consolidation
GTA 6's $2B budget, Sega's canceled Super Game, and Nintendo's record revenue all point one way: the industry is splitting into ultra-scale AAA and indie, F2P/GaaS fails for all but the entrenched incumbents, and the middle is collapsing.
AI Platform Vertical Integration
How Nvidia turned from a chip maker into the operating system of AI: the 20-year CUDA software moat, a $40B equity strategy, SK Hynix's HBM structural lock-in, and the fracture conditions that could still erode the moat.